


Greater Grandeur

by dewinter



Series: The Bloody Sire [6]
Category: Dunkirk (2017)
Genre: Angst, Emotional Constipation, M/M, Post-Canon, Reunions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-17
Updated: 2017-09-17
Packaged: 2018-12-30 20:47:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,554
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12116943
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dewinter/pseuds/dewinter
Summary: He’d taken to walking in the early hours, when the sky was still pink and the most he’d encounter would be milkmen on their rounds.*September, 1945. Battersea, London.





	1. Battersea, September 1945

He felt wrong, in civvies. The material didn’t fall right; everything felt too big, and too casual. The war had chipped little pieces of him away, until he was rattling around in these baggy, too-bright scraps. Maybe disappearing altogether, eventually. A snake about to slough off its loose, dead skin. As though he needed the crisp lines of the uniform to keep him upright.

People stared at him, on the streets. He could feel it on the back of his neck. It was the burns, of course, still visible up the side of his throat. Or else their eyes slid hastily away. Staring, or pointedly _not_ staring. He wondered if they could see the blood on his hands, too. Cuckoo in the nest.

He’d taken to walking in the early hours, when the sky was still pink and the most he’d encounter would be milkmen on their rounds. The city was beautiful before she awoke, even the broken-toothed gaps where entire houses had once stood, rubble cleared into neat stacked piles, now, for the most part. Only the absences left behind to testify.

Or else he went out late in the evenings, unencumbered by blackout or by curfew, the falling dark a half-effective mask. A few times, he rode the Northern Line from Clapham Common, and vanished into Soho for a few anonymous hours at the Swiss Tavern.

Since resigning his commission he’d been renting a damp and gloomy basement flat in Battersea. The landlady was a prickly Welsh woman called Mrs Jenkins who had a penchant for mustard yellow furnishings and seemed determined to catch him sneaking female company back after hours. He hadn’t the heart to tell her that wasn’t likely to be a problem.

The first had been a Canadian journalist with unruly black hair, who’d invited Collins back to his hotel room for a nightcap, and sucked him off without much preamble, pressed up against the dresser. Collins still felt a little queasy that he’d panicked and left while the fellow was washing his mouth out in the en suite. With the next – the barman of a ropey pub down by the Embankment tube station – he’d kept his head long enough to reciprocate, after a fashion, clumsily. The guy’d gotten spunk all over his cuffs, and hadn’t seemed too sorry about it.

And so on.

All the changes the war had made. Or made easier. Collins didn’t look too closely at it, in case it cracked. Perfunctory encounters – fleetingly exhilarating, and then dispiriting. Brief moments of life, and then back to the dull rote. And still no word from Farrier. And still waiting to feel normal, and human. Peace was a farce, with a war still raging in him.

Anger dogged his days. Some the same as everyone else’s – the wasted generations, the horrors spilling out of the vanquished Reich. And some, private and selfish. He was angry at Farrier, mostly, and at himself. Farrier’s letters began to fray, read and re-read, folded and re-folded. No clues and no answers.  

He looked up a couple of acquaintances from before the war – lads who a lifetime ago hadn’t treated him too shabbily for his being a scholarship boy – and bought Peter Dawson dinner near Barts one evening. They hadn’t much to say to one another, and the flash of pity on Dawson’s face when they’d met outside the hospital had made his stomach churn, but it was good nevertheless to tally up the survivors, and to reassure himself that they were all of them muddling through all right, or putting up a good pretence.

That evening was deep in September, the newspapers full of the first war crimes trials, and Collins walked a loop of the park as it emptied of lovers and dog-walkers, watched barges pass under the Chelsea Bridge. Lights on the water. They were taking down the temporary structure parallel to the bridge; its wooden struts jutted oddly from the Thames, abandoned. The trees were turning already. Someone had told him there were still living trees in Hiroshima, a handful of them, at the centre of the blast. 

He nodded hello to the groundskeeper, and sent pigeons scattering as he went. A grey end to the day; rain overnight, probably. The river was murky and uninviting, but it calmed him to skirt its edges and fill his nostrils with the sharp rot of the tide.

On his way back to the flat he bought the evening paper. His legs and eyelids were heavy; he might sleep tonight, with any luck. 

He let himself into the hall the tenants shared, thinking there might be a letter from Fiona or some word from the positions about which he’d half-heartedly made enquiries.

Mrs Jenkins’ voice floated down the stairs.

“Oh, Mr Collins, is that you, sweetheart? That’s lucky timing – there’s a gentleman –”

But Collins was already in the hallway, where a man stood examining the photographs of Mrs Jenkins’ grandchildren crowding the mantel. He turned at the sound of Collins’ boots on the tiles.

“ _Christ_ ,” Collins hissed.

“Not quite,” Farrier said lightly, and dropped his haversack at Collins’ feet.  


	2. Battersea, September 1945

Farrier stood in the doorway of the basement while Collins cleared a stack of papers from a rickety chair, and lit the single gas ring in the corner.

“Sorry, sorry,” he said, gesturing Farrier to the chair rather frantically. “Wasn’t expecting – wasn’t – it’s just been me, see.” He seemed unable to look Farrier in the eye – he’d looked away when Farrier had gripped his hand in the hallway, saying, inadequately, _bloody good to see you again, man._

Collins turned away to fill the kettle and settle it on the ring. His hands fluttered over the tea caddy, the spoon rattling against the side. It gave Farrier a chance to look at him properly. He was taller than he’d remembered, and had lost the childish lankiness of years ago. The threadbare jumper barely hid the muscles of his shoulders. And then there were the other things that had changed.

“You never told me,” Farrier said bluntly. Half a question. Collins didn’t turn away from the kettle; the subject was obvious. “In your letters, I mean. You never –”

Collins’ back tensed. “I didn’t want to –” he began. He glanced back over his shoulder, and Farrier saw again the livid tranche of scar tissue up the side of his face. “Didn’t seem much, compared to what you were going through.”

“I wish I’d known, all the same.” He wished a lot, and little of it had come to pass.

“It was years ago,” Collins said. “Autumn of forty-two, over Dieppe. Put me out of commission for a few months. Don’t think about it much these days, truth be told.” His hands were shaking still, though, and Farrier knew he was lying. He remembered that from Uxbridge; that Collins, even more than the rest of them, would always insist that he was fine, no matter how dicey the op had been, and Farrier would fight against the urge to shake the stubborn pride out of him.

A heavy, awkward silence fell between them. The whole place was oppressive and a little miserable, half underground, the handful of Collins’ possessions not enough to make it feel a home. Everything for one; a razor and a toothbrush and a stack of paperbacks, Neville Shute or Leslie Charteris or the like. A postcard of Edinburgh Castle on the mantel. A navy scarf Farrier was sure he recognised thrown over the end of the bed. A little like a cell, though he tried not to think in those terms any longer.

Collins had to dig in his footlocker for a second mug, a chipped enamel thing that he’d likely had since basic. He poured the tea and passed it across, and leaned against the small writing-desk next to Farrier’s chair, staring into his mug.

“Where –” Collins started, without looking up, and in the pause as he fought for the words Farrier knew there were a hundred questions. Where he’d been. Why he’d disappeared after setting foot back in England. What to do now – whether they still knew each other – if they ever had. Why he’d come here, now.

_I’m sorry,_ Farrier wanted to say. He almost laughed – if they began, they might continue like that for years, passing apologies back and forth for everything that had been done to them, and the ways the war had changed them, and for their powerlessness. He drank; the tea was weak and tepid and reassuringly quotidian.

“I went to see my mother,” he said. Scarcely an answer.

Collins said nothing, but looked at him at last. His knuckles were wrapped white around his mug.

“She’s dead,” Farrier said. It came out offhand and bitter, as though he blamed her. Perhaps he did. “She died eight months ago, as it turns out.”

“ _Jesus,”_ Collins whispered.

“Yes. Pneumonia. Didn’t know a thing about it in the clink, of course.” He sniffed a laugh, or half of one. “Don’t think of people dying of pneumonia in wartime, do you? Such a – such a _boring_ way to die. All these new ways of killing each other. And it turns out old women just – go on dying, like they’ve always done.”

“I’m sorry you weren’t there,” Collins said. He looked for a moment as though he might reach out a hand and touch him.

Farrier drank again, so he wouldn’t have to deal with the tenderness. There was a hollow inside him. “Took me a while to settle things. I sold the place, in the end. My brother’s been out in Australia for years – he didn’t want to be saddled with it.” It was half the truth. The auction had taken place six weeks back. The last telegram from Christopher had made it clear he considered the settling of their parents’ estate the end of their association. No great loss.

And since then he’d been running - proving to himself there were no more walls, and the longer he’d stayed away, the harder it had been to come back.

But he could stomach food again, and his strung-out body was returning to its old vitality. Silence no longer disturbed him, and though he’d broken into a sudden, cold sweat in a glass elevator the previous week, he found he could mostly tolerate closed doors once more. Returning to the world, a heartbeat at a time. _Recalled to life._

Maybe finding Collins was the final step in his unburial. Collins, who was older and sadder, less whole and more cynical, and still almost the proud, earnest boy he’d carried in his heart, knowingly or otherwise, for years. Whose letters had been a smouldering of hope.

“You resigned your commission?” he asked, swallowing the sour dregs of the tea.   

Collins looked at him for several empty seconds. “Aye,” he said. “Aye, I’ve had my fill.” He looked as though there was more to say, but shrugged instead, and asked, “What about you? Are you going back to it?”  

“I haven’t thought about it,” Farrier replied. It was a lie – he’d thought of little else, since his liberation, the thrill of flight, and whether it might unspool him completely to go back to it, after all this time. It felt strange to think of flying without Collins, though he’d managed well enough without him before the war broke out and they wrenched all those serious sacrificial boys from their colleges and clerical jobs and thrust them into the cockpit.

He wondered whether Collins had missed him, in the air. His letters had suggested as much – _I’ve had to get used to Williams’ voice in my ear._ But he’d had nothing but Collins’ letters for company, in the final months, and he’d wrung out all their original meaning, no doubt.

“Will you stay in London?” he asked. The city was a stranger, lean and battered, weary to the bone. He’d staggered through the East End after medical had cleared him for discharge, and each gash of destruction left him reeling. He’d known people at Bomber Command. He wondered how easily they slept.

Collins fiddled with his mug. “Don’t think so,” he said finally. “Go back home, I reckon. Funny, isn’t it – spent my whole life trying to get out of the damn place.”

“I always liked hearing you talk about home,” Farrier said softly.

Collins laughed without mirth. “You did? I can’t even remember it. Why I’ve stayed here so long, God only knows. Look at this place.”

“Not much worse than those digs they had us in – when was that? They were fumigating the barracks – they squashed us all into those sheds, felt like they were made of cardboard, do you remember?” And here was another dangerous game: _do you remember?_ The easiest way to madness.

“The floors were always wet, weren’t they? Never did work out whether the roof was leaking or there was groundwater seeping up.”

“No, we never did.”

Collins was smiling slightly, the better corner of his mouth quirked upwards, and Farrier saw a flash of a past life in it, the lad who’d spent too much time polishing buttons and who always tied his half-Windsor all the way up to his throat, and would blush good-naturedly when Farrier teased him for it.

“It’s good of you to look me up,” Collins said. “I – it’s good to know you’re – that you –”

Farrier stood up. It sounded like a dismissal, before he’d said a word of what he wanted to say.

“Al, I.”

“We’ll have to keep in touch,” Collins continued, a false note of brightness in his voice.

In the pause that followed Farrier saw a wretched future, a slowing trickle of Christmas cards, and then silence, and his own heart, unthawed, still jailed. Everything they’d been fighting for, squandered.

Farrier wanted to punch something. They’d barely needed words, before. If he parcelled up the countless hours they’d spent waiting for the go, or recovering from another skin-of-the-teeth raid, what lingered was not the scant words that might have passed between them, but the calm, sweet comfort of simply having Collins beside him, picking lichen off the tarmac with his fingernails or pulling too hard on his cigarette, the dying sun glorious on his face and in his hair.

And now he needed words, and there were none. He’d thought of what he’d say, when this scene had occurred to him, as it had, with increasing frequency down the years. Something profound and heartfelt about how the hope of this moment had warmed him when the winter seeped through the castle and victory seemed incomprehensible. The sincerity stuck in his throat.

“I wanted – well. You can’t imagine – it was damn good to hear from you, at any rate. I’d have gone mad, else. That’s about the sum of it.” A woeful stab at honesty before walking out of the door.

“Is that it?” Collins said suddenly. He’d never been one for sarcasm, before; he’d been almost painfully sincere, and Farrier had been the one with the dry asides.

The sky had swallowed up the few, frugal words they’d hurled across it. Farrier had always known where Collins was, in the air, and had trusted, had _known,_ that Collins had felt the same. They had always been perfectly aligned, as though an invisible thread joined his wingtip to Collins’, and by extension, his heart. And now the ends dangled loose and untied.  

Farrier stood mutely in the middle of the cramped room, and wished they were writing letters again, where the distance and the paper made it simpler to feel.

“I don’t _–_ ” Collins said hopelessly. He sounded stricken. “I don’t know what to say to you. I don’t – Christ _,_ I’ve been thinking about it – about you – since – _Christ.”_ He half-snatched the empty mug from Farrier’s hand and went to the basin, busying himself with the dish soap and a rag that had seen better days. His head bowed so Farrier wouldn’t see his face.

Farrier followed him across the room in a couple of steps. Under his breath, he said Collins’ name. Collins raised his eyes to his, and the look he gave him burned him to the marrow. In an instant Farrier knew he’d not been wrong. He reached carefully across and eased the mugs from Collins’ wet hands, then slowly raised his hand and ran the pad of his thumb along Collins’ jaw. The burn was glassy beneath his touch.

The world waited, suspended, like the moment the prop cuts out, before free-fall. Collins’ eyes were wide and brave. Then he pressed his ruined cheek more firmly into the cup of Farrier’s palm, with a blazing, hard look on his face.

Farrier let out a breath he’d been holding for five years, and it seemed from the shaky fall of Collins’ chest that he did, too.

They looked at each other for long moments. Collins’ wet hands dripped suds onto the faded linoleum, unnoticed. Farrier pulled him slowly into an embrace – he was solid and real and warm, and it dawned on Farrier that he had not quite believed he was free, that peace had finally come, until this instant.

_“Farrier_ ,” Collins whispered, and Farrier felt it in the ebb of his mouth against his ear, rather than hearing it. And then, so tenderly and so gratefully Farrier could hardly stand it, “Oh, Lawrence,” his arms tightening around Farrier’s ribs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow, turns out dialogue is hard, folks.


	3. Battersea, September 1945

Collins awoke with the sunrise; he’d forgotten to draw the blackout blinds. How quickly they lost the habit of war. Farrier was sprawled on his front, an arm pinning Collins across the stomach. Lances of weak light across Farrier’s bare shoulders, and scarcely a mark on him to map the years of imprisonment. Collins traced the almost alarming pink of his soft half-open mouth, and the memory of how it had unlocked him the night before. His face calm and blank and unhaunted by the awful brokenness that had followed him over the threshold.

Collins scrubbed a hand through his hair. His breath came in a shudder. A knot of worry in his chest. 

Farrier stirred – turned his head and cracked an eye, so that he caught Collins warily watching him. It was disarming to see him so exposed – the frank wrinkle of his brow as he raised his eyebrows in what might have been greeting or confusion.

“Hello,” Collins said quietly. It came out softer than he’d intended. Farrier screwed his eyes shut tight, and buried his face in the pillow.

“You snore terribly,” he said, muffled. 

“Do I?”

Farrier twisted his body round in a complicated manoeuvre that ended with him sitting up beside Collins. “ _Terribly_.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

“I think I can find it in me to forgive you.” The worry unknotted itself gradually. Farrier leaned over Collins to grab his smokes from the bedside table, and his chest brushed lightly against Collins’. He settled back against the pillows and clamped two fags between his lips, lighting both. The match took three strikes to light. The one he passed to Collins was slightly damp from his mouth, and for a moment it felt strangely more intimate than anything they’d done together the night before.

They smoked in silence for several minutes, tapping the ash into the dregs of last night’s tea. The bed was uncomfortably narrow; their shoulders too broad for it.

“What happened to your pipe?” Collins asked. It had featured in most of his memories. Besides, it was a better question than _what happened to you? Will you ever be the same?_

Farrier exhaled. “Made it all the way across Germany with me. Five years – and I go and lose it on the truck out of the damned place.” He stretched, and laid his arm across the headboard, half-wrapped around Collins’ shoulders. It was almost a hug, and Collins felt his body tilt into Farrier’s as though it were the most natural thing in the world.

And then more silence, and Farrier watching him carefully. A steady, determined look; it was too intense, and Collins looked away, pretending to brush ash from the comforter. Peace might be here, at last.

“Alasdair,” Farrier said, and Collins felt the arm around his shoulders tighten briefly. He looked back up; Farrier was frowning slightly.

“You - hmm.” Farrier scratched his chin. An absent, careless gesture. “You liked it? What we – what I.”

“Yes,” Collins said, rather too hastily. He’d rather thought it was obvious. He was pretty sure he’d begged, incoherently, at one point. “Yes, I did like it.”

Farrier looked at him for a moment, thoughtful. “Had you done it before?”

Collins considered lying. “No,” he said simply. He’d killed people, other human beings; surely the time for shyness was past. Still, he fought the urge to hide his face against Farrier’s collarbone.

Farrier was still looking at him. “Well. You can return the favour some time, if you like.”

The thought of it flustered him, so he extricated himself from Farrier’s arm, and plucked his half-smoked cigarette from his fingers, and doused it in the ashy tea, and then clambered on top of Farrier’s body, his mouth on Farrier’s before his weight was fully settled. It felt different from the night before – Farrier tasted of smoke and morning, and Collins’ mouth was tender and a little bruised, and they were slower, gentler kisses – but the same, too, the same calm rightness of it, the sweet heart-pounding fit of their mouths together and Farrier’s fingertips framing his jaw, steadying him.

The sheets bunched around his ankles as he shuffled down Farrier’s body and took his soft cock in his mouth. Briefly he thought he must look ridiculous, naked and curled over Farrier’s hips, but Farrier swelled against his tongue and grunted quietly, the muscles of his stomach leaping arrhythmically under Collins’ lightly resting hand, and Collins was taken away by the taste of him and by the thought that this was all he ever wanted to be doing, now or later or ever.

Farrier’s hands skated over his shoulders. They felt like wingtips dipping to land, restless and indecisive. He made a feral noise in the back of his throat, and Collins felt it in the pit of his stomach.

“I’ll go off in your mouth if you don’t watch out,” Farrier said – almost conversationally, but when Collins glanced up he saw through his hair that Farrier’s cheeks were flushed and his lip was crimson from biting it. His sparsely-haired chest heaved unevenly, and there was a savage gleam in his eyes. Collins raised what was left of his right eyebrow and resumed his task, his tongue flat and firm against the underside of Farrier’s cock.

Farrier’s thighs spasmed and he swore quietly as he spent in Collins’ mouth. His fingertips not quite rough in Collins’ hair. Collins swallowed, and sat back on his heels. He was grinning stupidly, despite himself, at the smear of sweat glistening on Farrier’s chest and at the gasping, punch-drunk look on his face.

Farrier beckoned him close, and he went willingly. Farrier used the edge of his thumb to wipe away a fleck of spittle or of spunk from the corner of Collins’ lips, and rested his palm briefly on Collins’ bare shoulder. 

“You’re rather good at that,” he said mildly.

“Always was a quick study,” Collins said, climbing out of bed and crossing to the wash basin. He looked back over his shoulder – it seemed natural, to be stark naked in front of Farrier, to have his eyes unabashedly on him. “Don’t you remember?”

Farrier smiled; the corners of his eyes crinkled fondly. “Yes. Yes, I do.” He swung his legs over the side of the bed and sat up. “First time they took you up, I thought - he’ll be dead inside a month.”

“Och, I wasn’t that bad, was I?”

Farrier heaved himself upright and strode across the small room. “A shambles,” he said baldly, his hands stealing warm onto Collins’ hips.

Collins’d meant to swill his mouth out, but in the end it was the easiest thing to kiss him, to line their bodies up chest to chest and toe to toe. If the taste of his own come remained, Farrier didn’t seem to mind. The thatch of hair between his legs tickled the tops of Collins’ thighs. Collins wrapped his arms around Farrier’s neck and felt his gut twist at the hot weight of his cock smooth against his leg.

“Quick learner. Look at you now,” Farrier said. He kept Collins close, his hands gripping his shoulders. “With your medals.”  

Collins laughed. It seemed to take Farrier by surprise. “I’m not sure this is quite what the Royal Air Force envisaged.”

Farrier’s look was inscrutable. Collins felt disarmed – that was a remnant of their prior acquaintance, the feeling of being scrutinised by Farrier, and of never quite knowing if he’d been found wanting.

“Are you hungry?” Collins blurted, instead of _will you stay._ Instead of _don’t leave me again._

“Mm.” Farrier nodded; he looked younger, in the morning gloom.

 “There’s a caf on the Wandsworth Road. Still has eggs sometimes, if you go early enough.”

They dressed deftly and crept out into the dawn. Only a saucer-eyed cat awake to hiss at them. The first few steps ached between his legs, and he winced sharply enough that Farrier glanced at him in concern. Collins looked away, laughing away his damned blushing, and knew he’d be thinking of the night for years, bent panting over the writing desk because the bedstead creaked too loudly, Farrier inside him and his lips hot against the side of his neck; he’d be remembering it forever.  

They walked briskly to the Wandsworth Road, at any given moment no more than inches apart, and Collins thrust his hands into the deep pockets of his great coat to stop himself from reaching out and pulling Farrier towards him. He’d not missed the air force since leaving, but now he ached to fly with Farrier again, longed to tug at the psychic tether that had kept them alive and lethal together in the sky.

The caf was out of eggs, but the harried cook served them stewed tomatoes and bread fried in plenty of dripping, and Collins watched Farrier shovel his breakfast away unceremoniously, hunched over his plate as though it might be snatched away at any moment. Their knees brushed under the table, and Farrier glanced up from his rubbery tinned mushrooms, and held his gaze while he swallowed. Collins felt his gut twist pleasantly to think they were having a whole, intimate conversation in a steamed-up, crowded café, between the brown sauce and the pepper pot and the constant whistle of the tea-urn, without saying a word.

It was raining hard when they left; they pulled up their collars and ducked under the awning of a shut-up fishmongers. A narrow space, so it didn’t seem odd to press together to keep dry.

“Where to now?” Farrier asked, and the racket of the rain hammering the canvas above drowned his voice, but Collins saw his lips form the words.

_Anywhere as long as it’s with you,_ he thought dizzily, and shrugged, grinning, not caring about the rainwater trickling down the back of his neck. He took a breath, and opened his mouth to reply, and waited for the future to swallow them up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much to everyone who's read and commented - a short, self-indulgent epilogue to follow shortly (i.e. before term starts and I am swamped with work). Much love.


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